Katrina: 'the View from the Right'

Besides which, even taking the thinking on its own terms, it's just far too sloppy to even start reckoning with. Let's see ... you have all these people who are very ill-served by the current social order ... that social order temporarily disappears ... and a small percentage of them exult in it. If anything it seems surprising that more people don't run riot.

that was one of the first things i thought of too. agonizing heat, rioting, fires, lack of drinking water, girls being raped...

"Statements of fact and well-considered opinion are welcome, but we will not post comments that include obscenities or insults, whether of groups or individuals."

And the posts are pre-screened. Someone had to read that crap and decided that somehow it didn't violate that policy.

the left:
innate racial difference is not a significant determining fact in comparative success. but the cultural perception of race, i.e. deeply embedded prejudice, is the key factor. insofar as there is a growing black middle-class, they are successful despite of discrimination, not because it doesn't exist, whereas the existence of the black 'underclass' just proves that given the extent of the societal obstacles that must be overcome, it's inevitable that many will not succeed in doing so.

the neocons: unlike the paleocons we don't believe in the importance of innate racial differences. we think instead that it's all down to culture. the black middle-class has succeeded because they have low illegitimacy rates, low drug-use, etc. All that the black underclass need do is sort out their cultural pathologies and then they to would be able to share in the fruits of the american dream. how can it be racism that's the problem when those millions of blacks who aren't crackheads, who have two parent families, who eschew welfare dependency, etc. get on so well? Whereas pandering to the pathologies that are the real problem through welfare handouts and 'affirmative action' only exacerbates things by creating an even greater sense of entitlement and victimhood, which is precisely what is a central feature of the pathology that's the problem in the first place.

xpost to slb -- Umm kinda yeah. Actually your neocon summary is the position of loads of black conservatives, and even loads of black not-really-conservatives. But the problem with your "the left" one (the problem with both, really) is that it's not just prejudice/racism that sets up obstacles, it's basic sociology: there are pockets of black people who have been poor from generation to generation basically forever, and live in situations where there are big structural obstances to success, even leaving racism aside. Crappy public education, dangerous communities, and a lack of guidance / access / role-modeling to key steps in "success" -- this isn't to do with prejudice, it's just facts on the ground, the same facts that contribute to this country having a pretty low rate of class mobility for everyone. So the left view tends to be that we should take steps to help solve for those obstacles, since they were pretty much imposed on black people through force of law -- and that maybe in the meantime we shouldn't call black people savages for being the ones who turn out to be poor, what with out not letting them be anything but poor for howevermany generations. And the new-black-conservative view isn't just "forget about racism and get your act together" (though that's part of it), it's also "look, nothing the government does to break down those structural obstacles is really going to help you unless you do something about building up yourself and your community both."

The funny thing about the black-liberal black-conservative split is that both things can be true; it's just a question of timing. Stuff needs to be done to exist pre-existing inequalities, and of course the people subjected to them have to take some responsibility for pushing their way into new situations. It's not an either/or argument -- just a question of timing, and at what point the focus should shift from one to the other. You ask someone to unlock the door, but you've still got to help turn the knob on your own.

NB in terms of timing there's a level on which the progress is remarkable. We have a growing black middle-class taking advantage of stuff they were denied only 40 years ago -- not even a full lifetime ago! And yet there's this weird usually-conservative idea that blacks haven't "done anything" yet, or are complaining too long, as if people were supposed to walk away from the colored fountain in the mid-60s and suddenly become radiologists. All because this nation's fucked-up idea of "choice" and "opportunity" fool us into thinking people can do whatever they want, no matter what their background. And that's not true: if you're born poor, chances are you'll live poor, and if a few generations down the line your family gets even lower-middle class, that's not a bad achievement.

This has happened already. A lenghty NYT Magazine story two years ago chronicled the shift. For most young Republicans sexuality is not a big deal, and this is borne out by the number of said young Republicans I've met (and hooked up with). Roy Cohn they ain't.

xpost Ethan you're just pushing farther along the hopeful timetable! Barring some big backlash, it'd be, you know, 10 years for educated Republicans, 10 more for a chunk of the voting base, and then a hell of a lot more beyond that before a Republican candidate could hope to be elected that way. Maybe when we're 50, I dunno, I suck at timetables. I guess the wildcard in this random speculation is that hardcore Christians just aren't going to gradually slide over into not-caring the way everyone else seems to be, and that'll obviously affect whether a Republican candidate can over cater to the center-right by not-caring what gay people do.

I have one of these uncles! Moved from California to central Oregon because "the Mexicans are stealing all my tax dollars here."

Mexicans in central Oregon: plainly not as good at stealing tax dollars.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4254

Nabisco, thanks for the response. Your mentioning of black conservatives and social mobility reminded me of the above piece by a black conservative writing about social mobility. Is it simply not true, as is asserted in the article, that "most Americans move up from the lowest 20 percent to the highest 20 percent over time"? I have no idea how this, if it is true, compares to other Western nations.

I have a very right-wing great uncle that I spent some time with last weekend. I wonder what he'd have to say about this. I think it's possible he'd go along with the "well, they're all savages, aren't they" line.

Just as an example. A middle-class suburban person grows up in an environment where it's normal that everyone goes to college; this person will basically be hand-held and showered with information and led directly to college as a normal, natural path, and this person will know this from as soon as they're old enough to understand it. A poverty-level city kid grows up in an environment where it's normal that a lot of people go to jail; this person will see plenty of people go there and come back, but won't really know so many people who go to college, or have information about college, or know the first thing about how one gets there.

Sowell would probably call that difference "values" or "culture" -- one culture that respects education and another that condones and celebrates crime. But isn't that just a matter of class -- a matter of real estate? How exactly is that second neighborhood expected to just will itself into a culture that steers people toward success? How many well-meaning black-conservative commentators going on and on about responsibility does it take to make a kid in that kind of place have the opportunities the middle-class suburban kid does? The talk might be good, but there's not going to come some moment where it magically works, and everyone in the projects suddenly wakes up thinking differently.

Values and class and who you're surrounded by: it's all the same stuff. And what's really irritating is that black pundits have to divide along this line and argue, instead of anyone taking a reasonable path. Class and culture -- they can't change unless they change together. Neither one is simply the result of the other. So yeah, the culture of really poorly-performing black communities needs to change, but the only way it's going to change is if the material circumstances its built for change along with it. And those material circumstances change a lot faster if the people living in them take responsibility for changing them. Do you see the circle? Both at once.

Uh...not a statistician, but that sounds like...um...total fucking bullshit.

It'd be like saying the worst players at quarterback in 2004 (rookies starting) are the most likely to be among the top quarterbacks in five years. It's only "fucking bullshit" when you only look at last season's stats like a still photo and don't leave room for skills to change over the years.

Yes. Of course. Well, now it all makes sense, then. Quarterbacks, indeed...Oh I look forward to Spurgen Wynn being Superbowl MVP!

I suppose there's a small possibility that this is true. When you look at the extremely wealthy you're not talking about the top 20% but more like the top 1%. Judging by the numbers on this page the bottom end of the top 20% makes $84,016 and the top end of the bottom 20% makes $17,916. So if you look at people who start off working a part time job when they're a teenager and then eventually go on to make $85k a year by the time they're 50, you can technically say that they moved from the bottom 20% to the top 20%. In other words, it's the type of bullshit statistic that may contain a grain of truth but doesn't actually say anything meaningful about class mobility.

by the time they're 50 and have house and car payments to make, children to send to college, taxes to pay, a portion of their paycheck going towards whatever retirement fund they're counting on...

Exactly. I'm just saying that if you actually look at the numbers involved then, yeah it's not surprising that some people move from the bottom 20% to the top 20% but it's still completely meaningless.

SLB: I wouldn't use the term "self-defeating." I think there are elements of culture among poor blacks that are basically built to function in some of the environments they're in, but don't work well in terms of getting a person into other environments. (There are also, for the record, plenty of elements of culture among poor blacks that are very well-suited to class mobility.) Some of these aren't even a matter of choice, just a matter of circumstances. As in the example above: if you grow up in a neighborhood where people are constantly going off to jail and coming back, it's going to be hard not to think of that as normal. In your world, it is normal; you don't have much of an opportunity to be horrified by it and disassociate yourself from everyone involved. Some black conservatives seem to imagine that this sort of situation can be changed by some giant collective act of will, but imagine: how in the world would that suddenly happen?

I mean, the good news is that there are constantly people moving up the class ladder from "so poor, so black" to "got a job, paying my way" to perfectly middle-class -- and that'll keep happening, and given enough time we'll hopefully be able to say this issue's fading away. The best thing to speed it along, of course, is for newly middle-class black people to maintain connections with those who haven't moved, so that a different kind of culture is available -- models of what people can do to earn decent lives for themselves, along with firsthand experience and information on how it gets done.

The thing that worries me now is the fact that it's largely black women who are doing the work of pulling up into the middle class.

uhm, yeah, bullshit. if you continually go on about The American Dream(protestant work ethic: "hard work = success", it tends to create a club to use, and i think that's much of where the whole "they're poor b/c they're lazy(read: they choose to be)".

what was that study that came out earlier this year that your financial success in life/class status had far more to do with who your daddy is than previously admitted?

this what SOME righties are doing :-(